What is Data Backup?

Data Backup is the process of creating a copy of the data on your system that you use for recovery in case your original data is lost or corrupted. You can also use backup to recover copies of older files if you have deleted them from your system. Many businesses and organizations protect their critical data with backup, making it one of the key components of a company’s Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Strategy.

Backup Storage Options

Backup to Local Disks

If you have enough capacity on your local disks, you can back up to them. These backups are fast and convenient and you don’t need a network. Local disk backups are best for quick backups of a small number of systems and are designed for the recovery of individual files or systems in the event of software failure.

Backup to NAS or SAN

This is one of the most common storage options. With a centralized NAS (Network Attached Storage), SAN (Storage Area Network), or simple network share, you can store many or all company backups in one place and restore a file, system, or the entire data center in the event of a virus attack or data corruption. Currently most of NAS and SAN have the disaster recovery feature which means that NAS and SAN can transfer data to a remote site.

Backup to Tapes

One of traditional ways to do that is to store copies of your data on tape devices and physically ship the tapes to a remote location. Modern tape technologies, such as LTO-8, offers 12 TB native capacity and up to 30 TB compressed capacity for long-term data preservation, making them quite efficient if you need to protect large amounts of data.

Backup to Cloud Storage

The modern alternativetape backupis cloud storage. With this type of solution, you subscribe to a certain storage capacity in the cloud vendor‘s. You do not need any hardware as you do with tape drives, but you do need an internet connection to send backups to the cloud.

How to Backup Data?

Generally there are several kinds of ways to backup data to storage devices.

LAN Backup

This is a traditional backup way, moving data to a centralized storage device across a local-area network (LAN). This is the easiest way to backup data, and you don’t need to add any hardware parts such as network cards or HBA cards to your severs. But transmitting all such data over the LAN can slow down the network and your servers performance.

LAN-free backup

LAN-free backup is simply connecting the server that needs to be backed up to a SAN, so the data is transferred over SAN to a data storage. Advantages of LAN-free backup include shorter backup and recovery times and less disruption to the LAN.

Server-free backup

In server-free backup, the data does not flow through the server being backed up. The server being backed up is still involved, because it has to do things like quiesce the database or quiesce a file system. But, once the frozen image has been created, the data movement no longer involves the original server.

Storage snapshot

Most of NAS and SAN storage have snapshot and replication features, you may define a snapshot and replication schedule on the storage, and then the storage can transfer data to another storage via LAN or SAN. On most occasions， you don’t need to install any agant on the server.

RPO and RTO

Your applications and systems are constantly changing data, and in the event of a disaster, all the data created from the latest backup to the moment of failure will be lost. This period is called the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) — the maximum period that you are willing to lose data on your systems because of an event.A shorter RPO means losing less data, but it requires more backups, more storage capacity, and more computing and network resources for backup to run. A longer RPO is more affordable, but it means losing more data.

Another important variable is recovery time objective (RTO) — how fast you can recover from the moment of a disaster to the moment you return to normal operations. When systems are down, your company loses money and you need to recover fast to minimize losses. However, as with RPO, a shorter RTO requires faster storage, networks, and technologies – so it is more expensive.

Recovery Testing

Please be aware that recovery testing is as important as data backup, Recovery testing should be done regularly after data backup. Generally you need a dedicated devices or environment for recovery testing.

Recovery testing is basically done in order to check:

1) the backup data is validate

2) how fast and better the application can recover against any type of crash or hardware failure etc.

What can we offer you?

Monkey Data Technologies can offer you a customized backup solutions to meet your requirements.To select the right solution, We can help you:

Develop a storage strategy based on your unique business requirements

Define your business objectives — the backup scope, RPOs, and RTOs;

To implement a reliable data backup solution,

Provision the storage or combination of multiple storages;

Execute and monitor the backups.

Your company‘s survival depends on the survival of your company data. Only then can you be sure that your company can continue to safely operate, even when unforeseen events occur.